Until the modern era, Christians largely took it for granted that Christianity is the one true religion for all humankind. By the late twentieth century, however, there were growing numbers of those identifying themselves as Christians who called for a radical pluralism in which Christianity is just one among many possible ways of responding to the divine. Explore the idea that all the major religions are more or less equally true and how Christians can respond to religious diversity today.
Jesus Christ and Religious Diversity by Harold A. Netland Nathan the Wise, the last play written by the eighteenth-century philosopher and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, contains a fascinating reworking of the classic parable of the three rings. The parable first appears in the fourteenth century in Boccaccio’s Decameron, but Lessing modifies it slightly so that it expresses nicely the Enlightenment call for religious toleration and condemnation of religious dogmatism.1 If it were updated slightly, it could be taken as an expression of early twenty-first century views as well. Lessing’s version of the story is set in Jerusalem in the twelfth century during the Third Crusade. The play revolves around the complex relationships of three characters, each representative of one of the three great monotheistic religions: Nathan, a Jew; Saladin, the Muslim sultan; and a Christian Templar Knight. Nathan finds himself in the great Saladin’s palace. The sultan tests Nathan by asking him which of the three monotheistic religions is the […]